You can learn a lot about how things are made when you look at how they fall apart. That applies not just to objects but also to institutions — for example, governments, media, universities. As the intellectual historian Peter Galison argued in his brilliant essay “An Accident of History”) aviation accidents are — or at least are inseperable from — institutional history. I’m glad he’s made this available on the net, because its original publication (in Galison and Alex Roland, eds., Atmospheric Flight in the Twentieth Century: Archimedes New Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, [Boston: Springer Dordecht, 2000, pp. 3–43) was, let’s say, a bit obscure.
Photos of an F-111 “Aardvark’ fighter jet after striking a pelican.
